A Hard Place: A Chauncey Means Novel

by Sean Lynch

  “I understand.”

  “I’m going to count to three,” I said. “When I reach three, stop. You ready?”

  “I think so.”

  “Thoughts don’t matter, Karen; you’re either ready, or you’re not.”

  “Okay,” she said. I could hear her exhaling deeply. “I’m ready.”

  The Subaru I was driving was only a car length behind the Nissan, which was only a car length behind the Mustang. Normally that would arouse any driver’s suspicion, but on Lake Chabot Road, where the hairpin curves followed one after another and the safe speed was around twenty miles an hour, it was not uncommon for cars to stack up.

  “One, two, three!”

  The Mustang screeched to a halt up ahead, breaking traction, kicking up gravel and dust, and finally coming to rest in the middle of Lake Chabot Road, like I’d told Karen to do it. The Nissan sedan behind it braked sharply, fishtailed, and skidded into the rear of the Mustang with a grinding ‘thud.’ The Nissan’s desperate attempt to stop also spewed dust and debris up into the roadway. The Nissan had mostly come to a halt by the time it struck the rear of the Ford. The impact was so minor it didn’t even activate the Nissan’s airbags.

  I was glad it hadn’t rained since last night. The dust cloud created by the two vehicle’s abrupt stop enveloped both cars, which is how I’d planned it to go down. The Nissan’s headlights, combined with the dust cloud, created a significant halo of glare. I surmised the occupants of the Nissan sedan couldn’t see much for a few seconds.

  Which means they didn’t see me.

  I began braking Karen’s Subaru at the count of ‘one,’ and as a result came gently to a halt directly behind the Nissan as it collided with the car ahead of it. I was out of the Subaru with a speed honed by countless traffic stops, and at the driver’s door of the Nissan with my pistol in my hand before the driver could clear his head from the impact. I thumbed down the 1911’s safety and took aim at a space equal distance between the dumbfounded driver’s head and his equally dumbfounded partner.

  The driver was a Hispanic man in his early twenties. He had on a Raiders baseball cap with a level bill and a cigarette behind his left ear, above the XIV tattoo on his neck. The passenger was a Caucasian of about the same age. He had on a beanie, a hoodie, and his chin was adorned with a sparse goatee.

  “Put your hands on the dashboard,” I commanded. “Do it now.”

  “No habla ingles,” the driver said with a smile. His buddy laughed. He and his partner in the passenger seat both kept their hands down where I couldn’t see them.

  I fired once, directly between the driver and passenger. The round blew out the passenger side rear window as it exited. Both men flinched violently and brought their hands up instinctively to cover their faces. I heard the .45 case ‘tink’ on the ground to my right and a little behind me. I took note of where it landed.

  “Habla now, shithead?” I said. “Put your hands on the dashboard. Do it, or the next sound you hear is going to be your mama crying over your grave.”

  Both men complied, their smiles gone.

  “Driver,” I said. “Leave your right hand on the dashboard, palm up. Take your pistol out slowly with your left hand and toss it out the window. If you tell me you don’t have a gun, or if any part of you other than your left hand moves, I’ll put another fuckhole in that San Quentin sex toy you call a face. And if that brain-dead shitstain next to you decides to move, you both get shot. Too complicated for you?”

  “No,” the driver said. He was giving me his best prison yard glower. I withstood it.

  “Dump the gun. Now.”

  The Nissan’s driver did as I told him. His left hand lowered, and he slowly came up with a pistol from his waistband. He tossed it out through the open driver’s door window. I didn’t watch it fall. The handgun was a Glock; the impact wasn’t going to set it off. Glocks, like most quality handguns of modern manufacture, have a safety feature built in to prevent discharge if dropped. The only way a Glock will fire is if you pull the trigger.

  “Good boy,” I said to the driver. “Put your left hand back on the dash, and have your partner toss his gun out through your window. If either one of you two douchebags give me a reason, I will kill you graveyard dead.”

  “You’re makin’ a big mistake, motherfucker,” the Caucasian occupant said, as he slowly brought a pistol into view. Another Glock clattered to the roadway next to the first.

  “I’ve made them before,” I answered. “Toss out the car keys and your cell phones.”

  “What?”

  “The keys and cell phones; put them on the ground. When you’re done, get your hands back up on the dashboard.”

  “You’re a dead man,” the Hispanic driver said. But both men again did as they were told.

  A set of keys and two cell phones plopped down next to the two pistols lying on Lake Chabot Road. Keeping the two men covered one-handed with my pistol, I squatted down and quickly scooped up the phones and guns. First I pocketed the phones; then I press-checked one of the Glocks single-handedly to ensure it had a round chambered. It did. I holstered my Les Baer .45 and directed the Glock at the two gunmen in place of my own pistol. Then I picked up the other Glock and repeated the drill. I ensured it was loaded and chambered while covering the duo in the car with the first Glock.

  I located my empty .45 casing. I took a step back, still covering the Nissan, and retrieved it. The case went into my pocket along with the phones.

  “Chance, what are you doing?” While my attention was focused on the two occupants of the Nissan, Karen had left the Mustang and approached from behind me.

  “I told you to stay in the car.”

  “I couldn’t just-”

  “Hello Missus P,” said the Caucasian passenger, cutting Karen off. “Lookin’ pretty fine tonight.”

  “Oh shit,” Karen said.

  “You know her?” the driver asked his buddy.

  “Hell yeah,” the passenger said. “I used to think about her when I jerked off. She was a teacher at San Leandro High before I got kicked out. Ain’t that right, Mrs. Pearson?”

  I gave Karen an inquisitive look.

  “His name is Toby Soares,” she told me. “He was in my class a couple of years back. He was in a gang. He was expelled for bringing drugs and a gun to school. He never returned.”

  “If I knew you were still so fuckin’ hot, I’d have come back to school,” Soares said. The driver next to him laughed.

  “Karen,” I called out over my shoulder.

  “Yes Chance?” was the hesitant reply.

  “Go home. I’ll be there shortly.”

  “Chance, I can’t just leave you here. “

  “Go now,” I said. There must have been something in my voice. She meekly returned to the car.

  “Do like your boyfriend says; get going, Karen!” Toby Soares called after her, cackling like a hyena. “Get your ass home. But leave the light on; I’ll be right over. I’m gonna put your ankles behind your ears.”

  “You ever ass-fucked a high school teacher before?” the driver asked his passenger.

  “Not yet,” he replied. “But I’m gonna fix that real soon.”

  Karen looked back at us through the open window of the Mustang.

  “Go,” I told her again. The Ford drove away.

  “Your bitch is getting fucked,” the driver told me. “But it ain’t gonna be your dick doing it. ’Cause you are gonna be fucking dead.”

  “You already said that,” I said.

  “That’s because it’s true, asshole. We’re going to find you and kill your stupid ass. After we kill you we’re gonna fuck that fine bitch of yours.” He gave me an ear-to-ear smirk, revealing a lot of crooked, yellow, teeth.

  “Which end do you want first?” Toby Soares asked his partner. “Mouth or ass?”

  “I’ll take the ass,” the driver laughed.

  “How do you like that shit, dickhead?” the passenger asked me. “We gonna pull a train on your bitch
.” Both erupted into more raucous laughter.

  “Did you know there are only two kinds of men in the world?” I said.

  “What?”

  I asked you a question,” I said. “Did you know there are only two kinds of men in the world?”

  “Fuck you,” the Hispanic driver said.

  “That’s not the answer I was looking for,” I said. “Answer is, men who get the job done and everybody else.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you two fucktards didn’t get it done.”

  “Get what done?” the driver said.

  “Exactly,” I said. I shot him twice in the face with the Glock.

  Toby Soares, gangster and former student at San Leandro High School, screamed and tried to put his hands up in front of his face. It didn’t help. I gave him a triple-tap right between the running lights; his hands didn’t even slow the 9mm bullets down.

  I had to move fast. Vehicle traffic on Lake Chabot Road is sparse most of the time, and on a Sunday night nearly non-existent. I’d seen no other cars, but didn’t want to push my luck.

  Using my handkerchief, I withdrew both cell phones from my pocket and set them on the hood of the Nissan. I checked the ‘recent calls’ feature on the phones. There was nothing I recognized on the Hispanic driver’s phone. Toby’s phone was a different story. I re-pocketed Soares’ device. Then I wiped the phone belonging to the driver and tossed it into the Nissan. The phone bounced off Toby Soares’ face. He didn’t flinch.

  Still covering my hand with my handkerchief, I inserted the keys into the Nissan’s ignition. I had to open the driver’s door to reach around the body of the deceased driver to accomplish this. I switched on the car’s ignition and cranked the steering wheel as far left as it would go. Then I released the hand brake in the center console and moved the gear lever into ‘D.’ The Nissan began to roll.

  We’d stopped at the crest of one of the hairpin turns on Lake Chabot Road. Which meant that to our left was a sheer drop of more than a hundred feet into dense vegetation. I watched as the Nissan rolled over the shoulder of the roadway and disappeared over the edge. Nobody was going to find the car until at least daylight, if then. There had been instances where motorists had struck deer along Lake Chabot Road and gone over. Their cars and occupants hadn’t been found for weeks.

  I returned to Karen Pearson’s Subaru. I got in, started it up, put it into gear, and headed for her apartment.

  I sure hoped I hadn’t ruined my chances for a romp with Karen.

  Most likely I had.

  Chapter 24

  I parked Karen’s car in one of the parking stalls at her apartment complex. I could see my rented Ford Mustang on the street. When I arrived at her door, I stashed the two Glock 9mm pistols behind a large wooden barrel filled with flowers on her doorstep. Then I knocked.

  Karen wasn’t naked when she opened up this time. I tried to conceal my disappointment by not exclaiming “Drats!”

  “Come in,” was all she said. I did as I was told.

  “I was worried,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. You okay?”

  She already had a glass of wine in her hand and most of it was gone. I could have used a drink myself. I wasn’t offered one; a bad sign. Karen began pacing around in her apartment.

  “I think so. I have to settle my nerves.”

  “Relax,” I said. “It’s over now.”

  “We could have been killed!”

  “I think that was the plan,” I said.

  “Are you serious? That creep in the car, Toby Soares; he knows me! He was a student! He could find out where I live!”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me; I took care of it.”

  “Trust you? After what you put me through tonight?”

  “You were the one who insisted on accompanying me,” I reminded her.

  “That was before we had our lives threatened. Those men had guns!”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m the guy who disarmed them, remember?”

  “Which reminds me; how did you know we were going to be followed from the club?”

  “Professional instinct,” I said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I’ve had enough of being interrogated,” I said. “Can I have my car keys please? I’d like to leave now.” I tossed her Subaru keys onto a table in the hallway.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “You’re not going to walk out on me now. We have to call the police. I want you here as a witness.”

  “I wasn’t a witness; I was a participant. You want to call the cops; call them. I’ve got nothing to say to the police. And I’ll deny being involved in anything you tell them.”

  “We have to report what happened!”

  “No, we don’t. What are the cops going to do?”

  “The police will arrest them,” she said. “They’ll lock them up where they can’t hurt us.”

  “No Karen,” I said, “that won’t happen. Not for a long time, anyway. You’re reporting a crime that didn’t occur in their presence. The police can’t simply arrest somebody on someone else’s say-so; they have to conduct an investigation first.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she scoffed.

  “No it’s not. If that weren’t the case, I could call the police and say, ‘Karen Pearson tried to murder me,’ and they’d come and arrest you. This is America; not Warsaw in nineteen-thirty-nine. People are innocent until proven guilty.”

  “Okay. The cops can’t arrest them yet. But they can make an arrest after the investigation, right?”

  I shook my head. “An investigation doesn’t guarantee an arrest and conviction, Karen.”

  “What can the cops do?”

  “The cops will come and take a statement from you. Then they’ll go get a statement from the two crooks, if they can find them and they agree to talk; they don’t have to talk to the cops if they don’t want to. That could take weeks, if the cops ever locate them at all. You think those two jerks have a listed phone number and a mailbox with their names on it?”

  Karen drained the last of her wine. It didn’t appear to calm her.

  “Once the cops locate them,” I continued, “if they ever do, you have to go and identify them. It’s called a line-up. When that happens, both suspects get to find out exactly who you are and where you live if they didn’t know already. It’s their constitutional right to face their accuser.”

  Karen stood looking at me with her empty glass like I was explaining the inner workings of a nuclear reactor. I went on.

  “Then the District Attorney gets to decide whether to spend taxpayer dollars to charge either of them with a crime. It’s your word against theirs. My guess is, Toby and his wheelman wouldn’t get charges filed on them. There is no physical evidence; they didn’t do anything.”

  “Didn’t do anything? Are you nuts?”

  “We stopped them, remember? Would you prefer young Toby and his chauffeur had perpetrated their crimes against us to solidify your legal case?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “So nothing will happen to them? They get off free and clear? They won’t go to jail for trying to kill us?”

  “They’d probably go to jail, but only because they might have outstanding warrants or because they’re on probation or parole. They’d be back out in a few days, or weeks, at most, and gunning for us again.”

  “That sucks,” she said.

  “It does,” I said. “But that’s how it is.”

  “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “Life isn’t fair,” I said back.

  “You were a cop,” Karen said. “How could you stand it when all those criminals got away with it? I don’t think I could take it.” She refilled her wineglass.

  “It’s one of the reasons I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “So
now we get to look over our shoulders waiting to get murdered,” she said. She drained more than half of the too-full glass in one gulp. “Or in my case, to get raped first and then murdered.”

  “I told you, I took care of it.”

  “What did you do?” Karen’s eyes narrowed to horizontal slits.

  “I convinced them to leave us alone.”

  “Did you kill them?” she asked, in almost a whisper.

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Like I said; I convinced them to leave us alone. We won’t be bothered again. But if it’s all the same, I’d rather not have the police called.”

  “We have to call the police,” she said. “What if they find out?”

  “Find out from who? Who’s going to report those two goons missing; the guy who sent them to kill us? Not likely.”

  “Oh my god,” was all she could say. “I didn’t think about him.” She stared at the ground.

  “Did you think those imbeciles acted on their own? Those two fuck-knuckles couldn’t take a piss without holding each other’s tools. Somebody was pulling their strings.”

  “Oh my god,” Karen said again.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked.

  “You were a mistake,” she said, ignoring my question. “We were a mistake.” She gulped down the rest of her wine and began refill the glass.

  “You might want to go easy on the wine,” I said.

  “Get out,” she said, without looking up.

  “Karen-”

  “Just get out!” she cut me off.

  “I can’t,” I said. “You still have my car keys.”

  Karen wordlessly set down her wine glass, opened her purse, and extended the keys to my rented Ford without making eye contact with me. I took them and headed for the door.

  “You’re an evil man, Chauncey Means,” Karen Pearson said to my back as I walked out of her apartment.

  I didn’t bother replying.

  I’d heard it before.

  Chapter 25

  When I got home, the first thing to greet me was my answering machine. The little red message light was blinking at me like a warning indicator. I should have heeded the warning. I removed the two Glock pistols from my waistband and set them on my kitchen table before pushing the button on my phone.